It sounds quite unlikely but that’s what they’re claiming here:
The closest I’ve seen to an all-school picnic during my time here was the one behind the library during the centennial celebration in October, 2012, more than 70 years after the earlier event. It was quite different from the rather sedate 1941 version. It was, in fact, mayhem. But it was great fun:
And it was followed by one of the most efficient clean-up operations I’ve been privileged to watch. The facilities staff was the unsung hero of the entire centennial.
I am struck by the inequality of the picnic. Girls, make three dinners and come to the picnic. Boys, don’t bother to do anything in advance, just come to the picnic, and eat a meal prepared by a girl. Sure, it’ll be fun for everyone! I bet the whole thing was planned by the men in charge. Sheesh!
I agree that the distribution of food-producing labor was unfairly distributed but that was the expectation back then, although it seems that the societal expectations were starting to shift gauging by the sentiment exhibited by the paragraph that begins “The girls immediately became suspicious….” Also, were the women still all living off campus at that time? If so, I imagine their kitchen facilities were more ample than what the men had access to on campus.
I think that this is exactly right, and no women were living on campus. It was probably intended as a way to foster male-female socializing, actually.
Women, alas, did not live on campus until 1957. But hey, that was more than 60 years ago now. As for “Rice boys”, Dent and Coney lamented, in their Thresher humor column ca. 1958-59, “Why do we always hear ‘Yale men, Harvard men, and … Rice boys’?”
“Women, alas, did not live on campus until 1957.”
And I graduated in 1956.
There just ain’t NO justice.